Native Instruments - Kontrol S4

As you'll know by now I'm not the most technically adept person in the world - it's taken me over a year to get average using Traktor and the VCi-100 and despite the controllers bugs it's been fun. But I'm a sucker for a sales pitch and the marketing of Native Instruments newest controller had me hooked from the moment DJTechTools posted the video of Dubfire using it. After a 5 month wait for it's launch and some hard saving up, I was lucky enough to get mine two weeks ago - despite NI under producing them and causing a fair few frustrated posts on blogs around the world.

I'm not big on change either, so switching over to the S4 has taken me another couple of weeks to really get into, and with so much new stuff to learn I plan to keep flitting between the VCi-100 and the S4 until I've got to grip with the layout and new features of which the possibilities seem endless.

Along the way I'll be posting little updates on things here on the blog, sharing my discoveries and doing my usual rambling about what I like and don't like. I'm sure they'll be loads of people out there slamming digital mixing, with a view on why their mixer of choice is superior and all that, but at the end of the day I'm a vinyl convert who never even tried CDJ's and that's that!

So, first things first, as you can see it's pretty big compared to the VCi-100 and fairly wide not leaving much room on my bench! Typical having made it especially for the VCi-100. But fear not, it's about 3kg's in weight so easy to move around if you were going to take it around with you (you can purchase a bespoke flight case for it should you want to). In an early demo video released by NI the controller seemed to easily slide around if you were slamming the cross faders - I don't do that to be honest, but it's pretty snug on the bench I have so not a worry for me and you'd really gave to slam them to move it I think.

The sliders are really nice and short (half the size of the VC1-100), and the knobs have nice rubberised grips and a good feel for turning - typical of DJTechTools customised approach to the mixers they sell. 

The magnetic resistance job wheels might sound a bit futuristic, but they really are nice to use. I had mine on the VCi-100 set to tight, to avoid knocking them and moving the track, especially with my headphone chord, but the positioning on the S4 is nice and out of the way and with the headphone jack being on the front side everything's where it should be.

If you're a fan of lights, then the S4 has lots of nice ones, that cool VW dashboard blue kind of light, bits of green and red here and there too - it even does a little light show when you switch it on. I've not tried it with the room lights off yet, but will do for next time.

Speaking of colours... the new software that comes as part of the package is quite different to Traktor Pro from a visual sense. For me they've stripped back the palette making it kind of grey and green - it's quite dull and some of the type is way too big. But, maybe other people won't be too fussed.

 

The build in sound card really packs a punch too. Previously I'd been using a rather expensive Pro-Ject external sound card - but according to NI it's essentially the Audio2 DJ built in - Sounds great on my speakers.

Having watched the DVD through once I was able to plug and play, but giving the big new additional feature - the sample deck - a go it was a bit chaotic - recording a loop was easy enough, but stopping it and knowing where it was playing in relation to the other two decks got a but much and as yet I'm not sure what I did but it played even when I stopped everything - lesson learnt! Read the manual, or in this case watch the manual!

The only thing that really bugged me about setting up the software was having to run a 500Mb update - the controller's brand new and already needs an update? On the plus side it does copy all your folders across from Traktor Pro - but not your crates.

 

 

















So far, and it's very early days, the best features I think are the looping function - being able to easily tweak this, set start points and adjust is great on the fly. And, the manual mixing ability is superb - actually being able to hands on adjust the beat matching, rather than just hitting 'sync' is nice - there's a little visual indicator of how far out the track is, but this is as close to mixing as I've been for a while!